Identity and Naps.
I worked at VSL today as every week-end. Thanks to Easter, there weren't many customers and my work day was summarized by the two words: Japanese Presentation. I think I really must have identity issues, 'cause the Zainichi issue REALLY fascinates me. And not just them, I started reading a bit about the Burakumin and the Ainu in Japan. I find those cases fascinating, especially the Burakumin... Technically they are ethnically the same as the other Japanese but they were disregarded because of their social status/position. So it just shows that the rejection from a person to another doesn't relate only to race, blood and cultural difference but rather from the misconceived perception we get from a person to another. It reminds me of the Tutsi/Hutu controversy (which led to the genocide) in Rwanda... I know I shouldn't get so excited about this, but it's so interesting. I guess recently I have been thinking a lot about these things and I've come to dislike the sentence "This is my culture, so you cannot understand". More than a cultural barrier, I think an individual barrier is more difficult to overcome and that a lot of people tend to blame their personal issues on "the bigger culture". Just 'cause it's simpler for them and more difficult for others to argue. Now I think I understand many things I didn't before... Anyways since I have many more identity-related cases I want to read about, I think it's a safe bet to say this summer will be pleasantly busy.
I took a long nap when I came home. I don't remember the last time I was feeling so exhausted that I couldn't control my body/sleep at all. Like, literally. I came home, I sat on the couch just for a moment (or so I thought) and I woke up 3 hours later, completely confused, with a bunch of text messages I hadn't replied, an empty stomach and a need for caffeine. Needless to say, I didn't get coffee, just cuz I know it would prevent me from ever sleeping the rest of the night... And now, what do I do?... I should continue working on my presentation... Or I should study Kanji... Or I should do all the other assignments I ought to do...But honestly, I really don't feel like it. Maybe I'll go back to sleep, wake up uber early tomorrow and get stuff done then...
I miss Ji-ssem.
2 Comments:
This post almost makes me cry. I can't express in words the despair I felt everytime as a child/teenager whenever a japanese person would say "well you just can't understand because you're not japanese" to me, whether I agreed or not with the japanese worldview. That's why I started reading so much in japanese at a very young age and studied about Japan as soon as we got internet at home: I couldn't stand it anymore, so if I can't be ethnically japanese, I at least had to be academically reliable.
Yet, there are still some people who would say that to me, and sometimes they can be my age and having studied abroad.
If we would be alone in the world we wouldn't need an identity, we wouldn't need norms, values, morality or any kind of reference to establish a certain context/world. We only need all those because we have to situate ourselves from others, because others have to establish a "sense" of our existence around them. And there's nothing inherent or natural to that process: it's all socially and historically constructed. That's what we call society and reality.
I hate that sentence "you can't understand cuz it's my culture and not urs". What an easy way to get out of a discussion. I think I might have used it before and only now do I realize how frustrating it must have been to others and how badly I must have shut them down from trying to understand who I am.
I think the whole identity, culture, society concepts are just things that we create because we need to belong somewhere in relation to others, as you said. And they would be amazing concepts if they were meant to make us belong to something bigger, to make us feel like the world is filled with people like us... unfortunately, I find very frustrating that those concepts are used as a way to make either people blend in something they might not necessarily associate to, or make people feel like they don't belong to it and thus feel different...
It's not a bad thing to be different of course, but why do people feel the need to reject that difference and sometimes refuse to understand it?? That's something that I really can't seem to grasp.
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